Lookin for Jah – Israel Portnoy (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO) – “Facing Flames Feat Guilda” Album

Please visit
www.israelportnoymusic.com to hear the album everywhere
Firstly, before I go off on a ramble and risk you not seeing the important stuff, I’ll start by saying that this song (and the whole record) would not sound the way it does without the super-talented soulful musicians* who I was literally blessed with having on this record.
Benny Weill, Yogev Glusman, Yoav Arbel Ari Jacob Malka Henna Russell, Avior Rokah Ron Gavriely Ohad Darshan Ben Wallick and Connor Samoral. Each of you inspire me with your art and took this whole record to a level it would not have reached without you. THANK YOU.
Now for the ramble….
Growing up, as a child in school we were taught about a God who was an invisible man in the sky who seemed to be sometimes happy, sometimes sad but most strangely he was often angry or on the verge of anger. It was very important you didn’t anger this invisible man we called God. From a very young age, it seemed strange to me that this invisible human had such human tendencies and primitive emotions. It was like he was almost a child. Why couldn’t he at least be a bit more understanding (and at the very least behave like an adult!?). Whilst I didn’t voice it to anyone at the time, by the time I was 9 I knew I didn’t believe in this God. I then spent a chunk of the following decade, unlearning that version of God and since then, I’ve enjoyed the challenge and life’s journey of redefining God/Godliness/Hashem/Jah/Universe/infinity/the divine/the aibishter/etc etc and with that, faith. I use all these names to point out that it really doesn’t matter what we call it/how you relate to it because essentially we’re just putting human names to something to try to help ourselves comprehend something entirely infinite (on our limited human level)
Whilst this definition has and continues to evolve for me in my God-relationship and this vast concept, one fundamental always remains: We all originate from the same source, as does everything in our universe and we are all connected in unity through this source. With that in mind, if we live by this (whilst easier said than done), if I hurt a fellow human or my surroundings/the planet, I am ultimately hurting myself as we are all the same at our core/source level.
Often in life, if we go though challenging times or changes which are complex to navigate, we want answers to help ease the hardship. It’s only natural as humans that we want to understand. After our fire on Moshav Mevo Modin (which ultimately inspired this record), I found myself in those moments, subconsciously reverting back to the child mindset and in my frustration and quest for solutions I wondered WHY?! Why me? How?! And then I when the shock passes and I could think and feel again, I remembered that God isn’t an invisible man with human tendencies or rationale and that we will never have the answers for so much of what we go through in this life and that’s ok.
(Told you it would be a ramble…. Anyway, these were some of the thoughts behind this song. I hope you enjoy it and If you do and want to hear more of the record, I’m linking it in the first comment :)
Feel free to follow me on Spotify, Subscribe on Youtube and sign up to my mailing list on www.israelportnoymusic.com
All these things help independent musicians so much more than you could imagine. Lots of love and Shabbat Shalom x